10 comments:

Thank you very much. This is devastating. But treating it as an argument with a conclusion, rather than a poem and artwork, I'm not certain the conclusion is correct, which makes me afraid. In fact I'm certain it's incorrect. It seems as though humanity can be bred out of people over generations in much the same way that you can breed colored markings and types of physical conformation into an animal. Curtis

It's hard to know at what point the fear and the adrenalin merge to become one thing.

The extremely cinematic top shot shows us the other side of fear -- pure atavism.

Numbers 6 and 12 plainly show fear on the faces of the players.

The blowing-out of breath (see Nos. 7, 8 and the picador in Number 16) is interpreted by the photographer in his captions as a sign of tension, a kind of high anxiety.

(I have deliberately not translated the captions; like the business in the arena, the language is culturally-specific.)

Apprehension on the part of the players is appropriate. A tormented bull may be a formidable adversary.

But while this is obviously a cultural ritual specific to place, it goes on also in Spain. I have seen it in both places. The feeling is much the same. Public spectacles of cruelty and bloodshed create a sort of electricity in the atmosphere, which helps conduct the current of brutalization moving through the arena. One's soul is never again the same.

Picturing this sort of affair can be a dicey matter.

There is the unforgettable set of pictures Arthur Rothstein captured in Matamoros for the government in 1942. The photos never made it into print for obvious reasons, but it is interesting to compare the distanced severity of Rothstein's vision with what we see here.

Sorry about that, the revelatory gesture in Number 8 (as interpreted by the photographer) is not anxious expulsion of breath, but the smoking of the cigarette before entering the arena -- bad for health, but good for calming jumpy nerves.

When I was 8, my parents took me to a bullfight in Madrid. I've never gotten over it -- first the spectacle, then the senseless blood drawn first by the picadors, then the rest. In one of the bullfights, the matador was fairly seriously gored. He, I must admit, looked extremely frightened, but he still bowed to all four quadrants of the ring before exiting. Years later, I was attending a friend's performance on a Saturday night at a bullring in Alicante before Sunday's corrida. The musicians' dressing rooms were the matador's dressing rooms, right next door to the rooms where they housed the bulls. You could hear the bulls snorting and huffing through the walls, which they kicked repeatedly. I was scared then. It's a horrible, horrible practice. Bullrings are great places for rock concerts, however. Curtis

I've been a vegetarian pretty much all my life (well, 28/36 years), but no one is immune from that natural ability to inflict suffering on something living. Fear makes it easier (and more tempting), and really, who isn't afraid these days?

The experience of watching ritual killing in any context is not purgative, as alleged. It's just disgusting. One regrets having been there.

Old now, and more aware of the primacy of pain in mammalian experience, I find it impossible not to look through the fear of the bullfighters, as though it were a transparency, to what we see only hints of here, the confusion and agony of the bull, for whom the spectacle can end in only one way.

I spent some weeks in the summer of 1963 in Madrid, and there the desk clerk of the little hotel had the bullfights on his little black and white tv every night, much as, at the same time, Americans had baseball games.

But watching a large and proud animal senselessly tortured and killed on a television screen is almost as unpleasant as seeing the real thing.

Though in every culture there are variants, in so many cultures (it often seems) so much depends on rites of animal slaughter.

"...no one is immune from that natural ability to inflict suffering on something living."

What's scary is seeing that repressed impulse released into a "weightless" environment, in which an animal may be freely and brutally abused at will.

The hidden camera information from the turkey slaughter "production line" shows turkeys to be even worse off than the bull. The turkeys scare nobody. They serve as aggression sponges for the workers in the warehouse.